Tuesday, June 14, 2005

voip for thick peasants

that's the guide I needed. until I gave up. after all, I've got a free ear piece that came from a sharp gx10 that happens to work on a panasonic tcd545em so I just use that to conference in to the multitudinous calls we have. no matter that I end up sitting for hours with a plastic crab in my ear and a slightly wibbled rubber cord hanging from my mouth like a black dog dribble. I can hear everyone and they can hear me and the phone line is all paid for.

the thing is, I want to look more ridiculous. I want to look like I've just walked into a call centre in glasgow and sat down at an empty desk with my super skate headphones the size of my own head and a great big protruding boom mike in front of my mouth that looks like I'm chewing a small horse. I want to get a high-end VoIP headset and talk at my PC like its a quiz show. so I need to do some research. which means I have an excuse to trawl around crappy online telecoms shops and PC overclockers to see what the great and good are buying and wearing while they're using teamspeak, windows media player and skype all at the same time while sat in a dark room in yesterdays underpants drinking jolt and sniffing into a mars bar.

turns out you can get rather nice high quality audio headsets are better than the headphones I've currently got and will plug straight into the Audigy 2 and let me crossfade and mix all my inputs and outputs so I can join the platform globalization conference call in the style of a bedroom radio podcast, with SOS by ABBA fading out in the background as I introduce myself and my plans for homogenized transitional deterministics, while Carmina Burana builds excitedly in the background and I announce my climactic project update to the strains of the 1812 overture and a cross-faded Been Caught Stealing. so I gotta get me one of those. of course, I can't have the headset connected to the soundcard at the same time as my 5:1 speakers as the green plug does both front left and right and headphones from the same socket, so I need to get one of these. still, that's more hardware, so it can't be bad.